God bless you boys for necroing my thread for me
Gonna go over the things I read since last time I posted
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges is amazing. It is quite dense, and mostly consists of fictional academic texts discussing fictional books and is written in a very academic style. I fucking loved it, but you might not. It’s not a long read, and I’m almost certain you can find most of it online if you want to try giving it a shot.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck might be the best book I read all year. I think the internet sells it as a retelling of Cain and Abel, but that’s honestly just the last ~100 pages of a 600-page masterpiece. I absolutely adore historical fiction and all the characters are given so much care and detail and feel incredibly real. I cannot recommend this one enough.
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro is about an old Japanese painter who is struggling to come to terms with how post ww2 Japan treats his pre ww2 propaganda art. Kazuo Ishiguro is amazing at telling the reader exactly just what they need to know, and If you’ve enjoyed some of his other books you will probably enjoy this one too. The plot, however, is to me the least interesting one of his books that I have read.
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami is a short story collection that is very much just short Murakami stories. If you like them, you will like these too.
Alt dette kunne du få (You could had all of this) by Josefine Klougart is a book I got my mother for Christmas last year because its about someone growing up like 5km from where she grew up herself. It’s written incredibly well and is one of the rare examples of Danish actually sounding good. As far as I can tell it has yet to be released in any language that isn’t Danish, but if it is someday, keep an eye out.
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami is a novel written by Murakami. If you like novels written by Murakami, you will like this one too.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan is about an anxious 50 yearold mother who struggles with climate change and social media and trying to connect with her early 20s son who likes to play video games and also about letting go of a dying parent. I would never buy this book but one of my classmates gave it to me because she couldn’t fit it in her suitcase. It was surprisingly well written.
Candide, or the Optimist by Voltaire is a book I bought in an English bookshop while visiting a friend in Paris because I asked one of the people that worked there what I should read if I had never read any French literature before. It’s surprisingly readable for a ~250 year old book. I wish I had taken some form of class on this book. It would probably be very fun to work with more.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is the reason I haven’t read more books in the second half of the year. It is by far my least favourite Murakami novel I have ever read. It was also like 900 pages. I’m not really sure why I finished it. The female main character is written as a caricature of Murakami’s dream girl or some shit and makes so much of this book incredibly uncomfortable and not fun to read. I did it anyway for some reason. Don’t be me.
About the Size of the Universe by Jon Kalman Stefansson is incredibly well written. It’s a multi-generational story about a family in Iceland, but honestly Jon Kalman Stefansson just writes so gorgeously that there isn’t really too much more to say.
I just finished A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro like 2 hours ago and I enjoyed it very much. It is hard to talk about what this book is about because literally anything is a giant spoiler. Ishiguro is still very good at writing.
Next up on my shelf is The Plague by Albert Camus because I also picked it up in Paris. Besides that, I’m like 30 pages into The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt on my kindle. I don’t think I’ll be finishing anything before the new year.